I've rebased this to master and attached.
The rebase wasn't trivial so I might have messed up.
The cut.pl test is now failing on master. Could you have a look.
Also could you add a test (or just a bit of shell) to demonstrate
which options the memory is not allocated for example.
Ideally some pathological option combo that no longer
allocates huge amounts of RAM.

thanks,
Pádraig.